Fog Lights
The mists of misinformation and disinformation obscured the views of voters. Will new tools for public knowledge better illuminate the road ahead?
Welcome to Route 24, a new parking space for stories driving public trust!
DRIVERS ED parks in your inbox on Tuesdays to shift your gears on key policy debates and test drive people-powered solutions.
Have you ever driven at night through a thick fog zone? Your windshield is completely covered by the mist, making it difficult to see the road in front of you and up ahead. The usual tools, standard car lights or high beams, are useless; they reflect off the fog and obscure road visibility. Fog lights, however, are strategically placed just above the ground at the cutoff angle to clear the sightline of the driver.
America, and its allies, are headed for foggy weather. If you’ve been online in the weeks following the election, theories have circulated about what worked and what didn’t for each partisan bloc. It’s important to note that until comprehensive data is collected and collated, nothing postulated is conclusive. That said, the usual tools - formidable fundraising, micro-targeting constituencies, expert consensus - haven’t cleared the mists of misinformation and disinformation obscuring the factual visibility of the American public. Will new tools for public knowledge serve as America’s fog lights and better illuminate the road ahead? It’s possible.
In How America Got Mean, David Brooks argues that America lost its moral clarity due to different avenues of valuation. On one side, the method for achievement doesn’t matter if you win or support the winner. On the other side, the method for achievement is built on core principles that drive improvement for the majority, not solely the winners and their supporters. Whether the result of a conscious decision or the byproduct of a systemic approach, it’s hard to do better if you don’t know better. People also feel the most urgency for the crises that affect them directly, not which may factually be the most pressing. One example: the humanitarian need in South Sudan, which far outpaces that of MENA region conflicts. Brooks suggests a multi-part solution to alleviate America’s moral dilemma: collective commitments to intergenerational service, social groups and settings that assign priority to moral character, a return to moral realism in mainstream political culture, and an educational curriculum that incentivizes moral growth.
Getting up to speed on how misinformation and disinformation circulate is also mission critical. According to a recent UNESCO survey, 85% of the global population sees misinformation and disinformation as a dominant concern. In MisInformation Really Does Spread Like A Virus, David Robert Grimes and Sander van der Linden compare the speed at which inaccurate news travels over the internet to the spread of a contagion. This matches Nathan Heller’s assessment of the ambience of information: hasty generalizations track better with the general public than specific details. When categorized into susceptible, infected, and resistant groups, known as the SIR model, tracking the propagation of false information across a population sample becomes easier to navigate. Unless, of course, the source of the false information has hundreds of millions of followers. In these superspreader events, getting ahead of the viral circulation becomes nearly impossible. Grimes and van der Linden suggest applying prebunking or psychological inoculation to stop the spread. Their case study deployed AI chatbots to prime a population sample about the risk of election misinformation and disinformation, alerting participants to key phrasing and other identifiers, known as prebunks. With prebunks activated, the population sample displayed immunity to sources of misinformation and disinformation, suggesting a possible containment protocol for such instances.
To be most effective in reaching communities going forward, the Democrats need to jumpstart the conversation on political persuasion. This is not a time to look away or assign blame, but to come together in action, and to me, that begins with a comprehensive approach to people, power, and the press. I want to remind you that data trends speak to most people who voted, not most people overall. I want to better understand the people who decided not to vote this cycle and learn what they care about. I want to see messaging move away from repetitive call-to-action statements that permeate across coalitions and move towards actionable, community-driven solutions. Will this fix everything? Of course not. But if we can condition the American public to expect moral politics, be aware of digital interference, and actively listen to one another, it’s a good start.
Stay the course,
Sam
Additional Notes - Policy Roadmaps:
Note: Route 24’s Toolkit and About Page are currently being updated to meet the moment. If you have any feedback in the interim, please feel free to send me a message directly.